Notes From Notes

(Nearly) random excerpts from Robert Bresson’s Notes On Cinematography (1977):

Cinematography, the art, with images, of representing nothing.

Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.

Shooting. No part of the unexpected which is not secretly expected by you.

Many people are needed in order to make a film, but only one who makes, unmakes, remakes his images and sounds, returning at every second to the initial impression or sensation which brought these to birth and is incomprehensible to the other people.

Economy: Racine (to his son Louis): I know your handwriting well enough, without your having to sign your name.

Respect man’s nature without wishing it more palpable than it is.

Actor. The to-and-fro of the character in front of his nature forces the public to look for talent on his face, instead of the enigma peculiar to each living creature.

To defeat the false powers of photography.

Two persons, looking each other in the eye, see not their eyes but their looks. (The reason why we get the color of a person’s eyes wrong?)

From the beings and things of nature, washed clean of all art and especially of the art of drama, you will make an art.

X demonstrates a great stupidity when he says that to touch the masses there is no need of art.

Not to shoot a film in order to illustrate a thesis, or to display men and women confined to their external aspect, but to discover the matter they are made of. To attain that “heart of the heart” which does not let itself be caught either by poetry, or by philosophy or by drama.

Empty the pond to get the fish.

Don’t run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins (ellipses).

Your film’s beauty will not be in the images (postcardism), but in the ineffable that they will emanate.

Production of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion.

The CINEMA did not start from zero. Everything to be called into question.

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7 Responses to “Notes From Notes”

Some of his films I dislike (too detached, too absurd, too bent on their dogmatic ways), and some I find brilliant (Au Hasard Balthazar, Le Proces de Jeanne D’Arc) but I always appreciate artists with their own particular style and vision.

“Don’t run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins (ellipses).”

This is absolutely true. I get dismayed so many times by works of art that chase poetry.

There is a poetry and a somber underpinning in Bresson’s work, but the argument here is for filmmaking purity and uncompromising austerity, which is what set this genius apart from everyone else in the cinema. Perhaps only Dreyer was conceived in this mold.

“Your film’s beauty will not be in the images (postcardism), but in the ineffable that they will emanate.”

I am extremely sympathetic to the ways in which Bresson thinks about cinema, although like any critical or theoretical framework I do think it has its limitations, and need not be adopted in any universal sense or as a manifesto, or in a way that would limit what we can experience cinematically. But this is such a great line, perhaps because it’s so far beyond explanation, yet somehow understood. At the same time, though, I think Bresson is cheating a bit here, underselling his own preoccupation with beauty in his films. Something he said in 1970 in an interview regarding nudity in films: “I am not at all against nudity so long as the body is beautiful; only when the body is ugly is its nudity obscene. It is like kissing. I can’t bear to see people kissing on the screen. Can you?” Maybe we mean different things here, but maybe not.

That’s mighty interesting, Peter. In the same book he says: “In the nude, all that is not beautiful is obscene.”. I thought that by “beautiful”, he really refers to the beauty of the spirit. That interview excerpt throws in a new dimension…